Review Summary

In “Among the Thugs,” Bill Buford’s horrifying nonfiction book about the brutal excesses of British soccer hooliganism, he writes about gangs of fans who travel to European cities like Turin ostensibly to support their teams. In one unforgettable scene Mr. Buford watches as hordes of Manchester United followers swarm out of a Turin stadium and into the streets in a frenzy of violence, savagely beating anyone, children included. In the middle of the mayhem, in between the stomping and punching, he overhears one of the rampaging goons say, “The city is ours” and repeat the word ours, ours, ours. There’s a sense that the rioting is a kind of postcolonial invasion for at least this one thug, an idea that’s cemented when later he says, “We took the city.” There’s little overt violence in “The Inbetweeners,” a nearly laugh-free British comedy about four teenage boys who travel to Malia, in Crete, to drink and have sex and then drink some more when they don’t have sex. Even so, there’s a noticeable thuggish undertow to the scenes of the teenagers boozing and sometimes spewing their way through a foreign city amid hundreds of their similarly sodden, wretched and retching countrymen and women.